Information Technology has become indispensable for any business in today’s digital age. Harnessed the right way, enterprise IT boosts efficiency and improves competitiveness. But in many enterprises, the opposite is true. IT becomes a cost-centre.

The main reason enterprises struggle with IT operations is low digital maturity. The digital tools in use do not optimise operations or improve customer experiences. This is often due to a lack of a coherent approach to IT. Disjointed and piecemeal implementation means the new tech does not integrate well into the network. A company uses 976 applications and integrates only 28% of them, on average.  Also, much of the process is ad-hoc and people-dependent. Such an approach leads to silos, errors, and inefficiencies. It also degrades the customer experience.

The solution is Unified IT Operations Management (UITO).

UITO combines people, processes, and technology. It involves consolidation and optimisation of IT operations across the enterprise. At its core, it establishes an integrated platform to manage the enterprise IT infrastructure.  

Optimal Resource Utilisation

As digitisation continues unabated, IT costs start to add up in most enterprises. Soon, the C-suite starts asking cost-benefit questions. UITO ensures optimal resource use and ensures a positive cost-benefit.

Enterprises adopting unified operations can modernise and optimise their IT infrastructure set-up by making trade-offs related to costs, staffing, and risks. They can make the right cloud strategies to extract maximum benefits from their cloud investments. For instance, they can choose among hybrid, edge, and multi-cloud strategies, depending on what works best for them in the short term and long-term. 

UITO’s deep integration capabilities offer enterprise teams a connected management environment. For instance, UITO tools can pull real-time data from operations, IT, HR, finance, and other functional areas. Such integration provides a comprehensive view of the enterprise’s resources and needs. This enables dynamic resource allocation and distributing workloads across multiple resources. Instances of over-provisioning or under-provisioning are reduced. Such approaches optimise resource usage, pre-empt performance degradation, and extend equipment lifespan.

Deep integrations also make shadow IT unnecessary. Business users often set up shadow IT to bypass the central IT team and get work done faster. But these shadow IT resources do not integrate with the network. Visibility blocks, silos, duplications, and increased overheads become commonplace. The entire enterprise network becomes more vulnerable to security risks. Seamless integrations allow easy access to resources, removing the reason for shadow IT.

Proactive Workflows

The biggest impact of UITO is making business processes proactive. IT transforms from a reactive problem-solving function to proactive prevention and optimisation.

The biggest impact area is in security. UITO co-opts network monitoring and predictive analytics tools. These tools leverage big data for proactive capacity planning and align IT resources with business needs. For instance, analysis of sales data, customer behaviour, and trends predict peak holiday traffic. A comparison with the projected demand with current infrastructure capacity predicts potential bottlenecks. Such forecasts allow pre-emptive strategies. The enterprise could, for instance, scale servers, implement load balancing, and more

Another major use case is in network security. Analytic tools identify potential issues and anomalies before they escalate. For instance, analysing performance metrics predicts hardware failures to schedule preventive maintenance.

Root cause analysis pinpoints the underlying issues. It enables a permanent fix instead of treating the symptoms. Consider a situation of slow response times when accessing a business application. A reactive, knee-jerk reaction would allocate more resources to the application server. Such a fix addresses the symptom of slow application performance but need not fix the issue or cause it to recur. A root-cause analysis discovers underlying issues. The issue could be the database being unable to handle increasing load, causing query delays. It could also be a poorly optimised application code that causes excessive resource consumption. The issue could also be elsewhere, such as network latency delaying response time. Or outdated server hardware being unable to handle the workload. Such insights enable the IT team to implement targeted solutions for a permanent fix.

Proactive IT administration improves efficiency, reduces errors, and delivers better service quality. Identifying and addressing potential risks pre-empts disruptions. System reliability and integrity improve. The direct financial benefits include reduced losses due to IT breaches or incidents. The indirect benefits come through better risk management. 

Improved Collaboration and Decision Making

UITO improves collaboration and decision-making.

Integrated reporting tools and dashboards empower business users with ready access to information. They gain complete visibility of the value chain. Integrated analytics tools uncover trends and patterns. These insights facilitate informed, data-driven decision-making.

Integrated collaboration platforms complement integrated views and reporting tools. These platforms improve communication and information sharing. Seamless integration between different tools and systems to ensure free data flow. All enterprise users get a single source of truth, fostering transparency and trust.

The alignment between IT and business teams improves.  

A common vocabulary for IT and business functions reduces misunderstandings. Defining key metrics such as ‘order processing time,’ ‘system response time,’ or ‘data accuracy’ aligns IT with business expectations. It also allows syncing traditional IT metrics with business metrics. For instance, syncing ‘system uptime’ with ‘customer satisfaction’ makes it easy to quantify the impact of downtime. IT teams get a better understanding of business objectives and challenges. They become strategic partners focused on delivering business value and end-customer satisfaction.

Improved Agility

UITO supports agile infrastructure that can scale up or down fast to meet changing business demands. Enterprise systems become more responsive to changing business needs. Business processes become more streamlined. The deployment of new applications and services becomes faster, reducing time-to-market.

The complete visibility and centralised consoles enabled by UITO make it easy to offer self-service to end-users. The burden on IT teams reduces, and the enterprise systems become more agile. Consider the case of a marketing team that needs more computing resources to run a campaign. The traditional approach of requesting the IT team involves delays. By the time the process gets through, the opportunity will have passed.  With UITO, the marketing team can access a self-service portal and select the CPU, memory, storage and network configuration. The self-service portal, integrated with the underlying infrastructure, provides the VMs.

UITO also facilitates workflow automation, further promoting agility. Automated provisioning accelerates the delivery of new services, supporting business expansion and innovation. Automated processes track server and application health. They also make proactive remediation if they detect any anomaly, reducing downtime. Such automated processes free IT teams from repetitive, time-consuming activities. They get more time to focus on strategic initiatives. Reduced dependence on manual tasks improves accuracy and productivity.

UITO transforms IT from a cost centre to a value-added business partner. Businesses implementing UITO can streamline operations to improve efficiency and productivity. They can make timely, high-quality service delivery, boosting customer satisfaction. They can also seize opportunities to become more competitive. All these lead to an upward spiral of profitability and growth.